tom_

If there weren't a wide range of options offered, there'd be a risk of it not actually reflecting what people want - which is, presumably, the whole point of putting it to the vote in the first place.

Hold down secondary mouse button, typically the right one, and move the mouse. (If you don't have a mouse attached, you might not be able to perform this action.)

Producing shit code slowly hasn't held me back so far and I don't intend to start letting it do so now.

"Shall I make it sound more like a human wrote it?"

"Quite the opposite please Claude"

(I'm going to have to stop commenting about this stuff but it feels like there've been so many amusingly egregious examples recently)

The iPhone autocorrects it to eMacs... it's so annoying.

The writing style really seems to rub off onto people after a while, eh.

Apparently nobody wants artisanal writing either!

You don't get the option in the UI: there's just "Sleep", which on a desktop Mac seems to suspend to RAM only. At least, it seems to on mine, as I found out when I unplugged it.

(Apparently the laptops do a suspend to disk depending on battery remaining, so the OS does support it. It'd be nice to have it available! The disk space required could become annoying if you only bought the 1 TB SSD for your fancy 512 GB Mac though.)

I was >60% sure it would be AI given the combination of calendar year and the wording "what the browser reveals" that I saw on the HN front page - and only when I clicked did I realise how wrong I was, because the actual probability is 100%.

(Not to suggest that browser fingerprinting isn't a useful issue to highlight.)

Was there a top-down push? In general, people on average never really actually liked CRT displays all that much. They are annoyingly deep; they are heavy; the screen is flickery, or not quite pin sharp, or both; they use up a lot of power; they fail in annoying ways, and they're expensive to fix - and they have magnets in them.

I accidentally did the same thing, and after 20+ years I've also found my QWERTY speed remains pretty good.

I can type QWERTY ok on a split keyboard, but I have to look at the keys.

I can't type Dvorak at all on a normal keyboard, but it's not a big problem. (It is annoying when using my laptop's built-in keyboard, but I probably end up doing that for the equivalent of all of about 2 working days per year, and even more rarely for any actual work.)

It's standard for Windows. Double click a .exe, and a new copy loads and runs. If it wants to quit because there's an existing instance running, the code has to arrange for that itself. (It's possible Qt does this for you by default. Depending on the app, this can simplify some things, sometimes! Maybe WinUI is the same.)

It looks like macOS Finder tries to make it difficult to run two copies of a .app simultaneously, so I imagine many programs don't check for this case, but this is Hacker News, so we can use our hacker skills to try and do what they don't want us to: find the exe inside the bundle and run it directly from Finder, or run it from the terminal using its path. (This works for me with Ptacek's mdv app. Two copies of it end up in the dock.)

His site has always looked like this, i'm sure of it. This is what sites look like if you just write them as text. Not everybody knows how to use sql or css or java or whatever thing it is that lets you pick the font.

I was still digesting the throat-clearing intro when my eye noticed "quietly" and "honest" and I decided I'd not bother. But I scrolled through out of politeness, just in case the Basilisk will be very thorough.

> I want to be clear that I'm not against these tools generally. I use them myself

No essay is made worse by being stripped of filler. If the reader has got this far, this sentence is entirely redundant, I think.

Are we supposed to be able to read the examples with our eyes? It looks like black text on a very dark grey background on my iPhone.

EDIT: same on Firefox on my Mac (macOS Ventura).

The week has two ends. Maybe the people putting Sunday at the start are just trying to cover both options.

Where's the rest of the article? Is there a rest of it? It gets to the end of what feels like the introduction, and then just... stops.

If the NT design were as obvious as you suppose, then POSIX systems would work that way too.

It's typically referred to as CE to indicate the speaker's personal lack of belief in the divinity of Jesus, that might be implied by using the term anno domini. Nobody is under any illusion about whose birth began this era.

This was an interesting test, thank you for posting the link. I also found the AI writing in it harder to spot than I expected, but I suppose I'm mostly tuned in to the low-quality Claude-style slop that's most commonly posted to HN. The coding-oriented models seem to be optimised for feedback-driven code creation at the expense of the writing style (which stinks and is quite easy to spot).

This entire subsection of the discussion is about the apparent fact that some people just can't tell whether they're reading AI slop or what. And this surely applies to the haters just as much as the lovers.

Anyway, I've no doubt your blog posts from 2009 or whatever were not generated by an LLM. But this fuckin shit right here from 2026 though? LLM. 100%.

(By which I don't mean it generated 100% of it, as there's the odd sentence that sounds vaguely human, just that I am 100% certain that the LLM was allowed to far more than merely breathe on this writing. And that's enough to get me complaining, because it makes it a real headache to read.)

> Sort the corpses that way and they separate cleanly

Just like when you get a bit of meat on the bone in a stew, and it all comes out as one piece - but it's just on the brink, and the slightest of touches with the fork is enough to make it separate cleanly, and it just slides off perfectly.

I love it when that happens. I really feel like the author does too. That's part of why I like reading things written by people. Shared enjoyment of a shared human experience.

I have been doing this stupid shit for long enough that, frankly, I am only happy when it does exactly what I intended.

The goal is just to have the thing exist, I expect. Perhaps you might wonder to yourself: in some alternate timeline, where things played out somewhat differently, could the crappy old IBM PC have been coaxed into running an OS that was massively better than what we actually got? I suppose that won't appeal to everybody, and I suppose the idea of having the code largely auto-generated won't appeal to everybody either, but I think there'll be a few people left, and, for them: here it is.

In practical terms it's so useless that there's no point having a person spend time creating it, but, with AI changing the tradeoffs, now you can just have it created for you.

Additionally recommended: if attached to a debugger, the program should stop in the debugger, immediately, without printing a message (you can look at the code), or getting a stack trace (the debugger can do that), or whatever else, to avoid possibly triggering further asserts or causing more problems. This leaves the state just as it was (or as near as feasible), so that it can be investigated.

After being stopped in this way, it must be possible to resume execution somehow. Asserts are code too, and they can be wrong, and it may not be clear why, or what the ramifications might actually be for the specific case - continuing to let the code run can be useful for debugging purposes.

If you're right (and thank you for this comment by the way - I hadn't spotted any AI tells, but I think you may be, as they say, absolutely right about the maintenance backlog achieving immortality - a useful reminder that I need more practice), I'm not sure it's actually ironic. Since the statement does actually say that you can get AI to do all this stuff now, and doesn't appear to be complaining about this aspect of the situation.

So many billions of dollars spent on data centres, and they could have saved a lot of it by just employing you to do the writeups instead.

> And where a stack endpoints on a fixed silence threshold, those same speakers get talked over two to two and a half times as often

Is the reader expected to understand this sequence of words? Because I'm struggling a bit.

It's not a joke-it's an honest fact.

I write a Python script for this stuff. argparse with subparsers makes (fairly) light work of creating a command line tool with git-/svn-/etc.-style subcommands, and you get very useful autogenerated --help output. (The fact you have to statically specify your program's command line interface up front is maybe a bit un-pythonic, but it's all the better for it.)

Python is always measurably more lines than the Makefile or shell script equivalent, but just think of the effect on your productivity metrics!

The standard shutil and subprocess modules are pretty convenient to use as-is. They're a bit syntactically tedious for anything that's a very basic sequence of shell operations, but in exchange you'll never forget to quote the arguments correctly. And I've always found that these processes to tend to grow over time anyway - something that's much easier to handle in Python! There's also far more scope for additional error checking and nicer UX.